Bring your picnic baskets to the "front lawn" of our future home in Battery Park City for this unforgettable evening of outdoor readings and musical performances overlooking the Hudson River.

Audience members are invited to join us for a pre-reading walking tour of Battery Park City, featuring an introduction to some of its literary and artistic niches. The free tour will begin at 6:00pm at the Poets House booth, near the bandshell in Rockefeller Park.

Join Martín Espada, Galway Kinnell, Thomas Lux and Marilyn Nelson in a New York tradition that, according to Time Out New York, "could just make you fall in love with New York all over again." This unforgettable literary pilgrimage over the bridge that inspired Hart Crane, Walt Whitman and generations of poets begins near One Centre Street and stops en route for readings under Roebling's famous arches.

Carin Berger (author of the bestseller All Mixed Up and illustrator of Jack Prelutsky's Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant) reads from her work and offers children a crash course in collage-making using ticket stubs, newspapers and other unsung paraphernalia to create lively, cut-and-paste characters.

Part of Poetry Westchester! , bringing free writing workshops, poetry readings and talks to community libraries throughout Westchester--a county rich in literary history, from Edgar Allan Poe to Washington Irving.

Funded by the Westchester Library System (through the Westchester County Board of Legislators).

Who were the Beat Poets? Why are they "beat" and what does that mean? A look at their work, and the decades of the fifties and sixties in which they wrote, will explain why they remain iconic figures in American poetry. Their writing was shocking to some yet celebrated by others. Contemporary reaction to their poems was vociferous and divided. Today they continue to be notorious, though there is growing interest in their lively, noisy, exciting work. The Beat goes on!

Raymond P Scheindlin draws upon the letters and poems of Judah Halevi (1085-1141), the pre-Modern Hebrew poet and philosopher, to recreate the last year of Halevi’s life during which he abandoned his Spanish homeland to journey to the land of Israel. Though Halevi is generally considered the precursor of Zionism, this new reading of his poetry locates his pilgrimage in the sphere of personal piety and calls attention to the influence of Halevi on Islamic religious ideas.

Join Richard Lewis (the founding director of the Touchstone Center) in a poetry and art-making workshop as he explores the magical elements of light and air, accompanied by a performance of Play, Said the Air to the Earth by dancer Clea Rivera and musician Harry Mann.

In the spirit of Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara's collaborative poem-paintings, currently on view in New York Cool, participants representing several generations of New York City poetry respond to the atmosphere of camaraderie among downtown artists and poets from 1955 to the present.